An event like Wednesday’s slaughter in Paris that left at least 12 people dead, including four political cartoonists, at the office of the satirical Charlie Hebdo weekly, elicits so many responses that it’s hard to sort them out.

If you have a personal connection, that comes first.

I do.

I met a group of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, including one of the victims, a few years ago at the annual comics festival in Angouleme, France, the biggest gathering of cartoonists and their fans in the world. They had sought me out, partly as fans of my work — for whatever reason, my stuff seems to travel well overseas — and because I was an American cartoonist who speaks French. We did what cartoonists do: We got drunk, complained about our editors, exchanged trade secrets including pay rates.

“Yes,” said O’Brien, “we can turn it off. We have that privilege.” — Orwell, 1984

“Spying between friends, that’s just not done.” —Angela Merkel

The government has spied on me since 9/11. And I’m tired of it.

So I’m running for President of France. (Hang on, mes amis. I’ll explain in a minute.)

It’s not the lack of privacy. As a New Yorker, I’m used to that. I’m sick of the loud clicks on my phone and the ridiculous extra voices (“Do you think he can hear me?”). The inordinate volume of dropped calls. Emails that vanish from my inbox and reappear, sometimes in the wrong folder days later — or never.

Via Common Dreams, political cartoonist Ted Rall foresaw exactly where we would be today in a piece written in 2006:

Several months ago employees of Verizon, the company that enjoys a monopoly on local telephone service where I live, confirmed that my telephone has been tapped by the government.

“I don’t mind that Bush is listening to my calls,” I told the security department. “It’s not like I’m calling al Qaeda. And if they called me, I wouldn’t be able to hear them because of the noise on the line.”

Most Americans feel the same as me. We’re not doing anything wrong, so why should we care if the government knows when we’re stuck on hold? If losing our privacy can prevent another 9/11, isn’t it worth it?

No. First and foremost, domestic spying is not an anti-terrorism program. The CIA estimates that there are between 2,000 and 10,000 al Qaeda members worldwide.

Sharron Angle isn't the only one talking about Second Amendment remedies. Ted Rall, author of The Anti-American Manifesto, appeared on MSNBC's The Dylan Ratigan Show on Monday to talk about the need for radical change in order to turn the United States around. He said, "In The Anti-American Manifesto, I argue that violence is a last case scenario.... In terms of passive resistance, the American left has been very peaceful since the early '60s and where has it gotten us?"